Keyboard Shortcuts Series

It’s not the cure for carpal tunnel, but a keyboard shortcut can take some of the pain out of computing.

Hundreds of shortcuts are literally at your fingertips—built into programs. Others beg for creation. The Keyboard Shortcuts series surveys the built-in keystrokes and coaches you on creating custom combinations.

The Windows title includes shortcuts for Microsoft Office programs (Word, Excel, Outlook PowerPoint, and Access) and the Windows Explorer file manager; the Mac title covers Office v.X applications; and Adobe Creative Suite covers the graphics suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Dreamweaver. et. al) for both PC and Mac users.

We searched far and wide to find a font that could convert normal manuscript words into 3-D key presses—the central elements of this series. PIXymbols BoxKey was our guy. With it, authors were able to type any letter or word (alpha or numeric, caps or lower case) and generate the equivalent keycaps, as illustrated below.